News tagged with number

Don't be fooled by her age or her not-so-smart flip phone. Eighty-five-year-old Betty Lou Luce is spurring a technology movement that's spreading from bridge clubs to retirement homes across Southern California.

There is a growing consensus among archaeologists and anthropologists that the size of a population determines its ability to develop as well as to maintain complex culture. This view is however severely compromised by a ...

The top watchdogs in the House demanded to know Tuesday why a personal laptop taken from a federal building in Washington state was used to conduct child-support audits, especially because it and other stolen hard drives ...

Senate investigators indicated Monday they've received few answers from the Obama administration after a laptop and portable hard drives—likely containing names and Social Security numbers of millions—were stolen from ...

If you didn't believe a prevailing scientific position, you used to be part of a small fringe. To get information on your side, you would hunt around a certain type of bookshop, and subscribe to newsletters with distributions ...

Number

A number is a mathematical object used to count and measure. In mathematics, the definition of number has been extended over the years to include such numbers as zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers.

Mathematical operations are certain procedures that take one or more numbers as input and produce a number as output. Unary operations take a single input number and produce a single output number. For example, the successor operation adds one to an integer, thus the successor of 4 is 5. Binary operations take two input numbers and produce a single output number. Examples of binary operations include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation. The study of numerical operations is called arithmetic.

A notational symbol that represents a number is called a numeral. In addition to their use in counting and measuring, numerals are often used for labels (telephone numbers), for ordering (serial numbers), and for codes (e.g., ISBNs).

In common use, the word number can mean the abstract object, the symbol, or the word for the number.